Day off, Melbourne.

20 November 2006

Day off, Melbourne.

At Saturday's show Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze had invited us to come to visit the film set of 'Where the Wild Things Are', which is being shot on a sound stage in Melbournes Docklands. However, it turned out that shooting today was taking place on location in Flinders, on a piece of rugged coastline about an hour and a half south of Melbourne.

Bruce and I decided to make the drive down there to have a look. It was another absolutely glorious day with sunshine and a temperature up in the thirties. The drive down to the coast is gorgeous, with woods, rocky cliffs and rolling hills, so we enjoyed a temporary escape from our overly urban surroundings of the past month.

We followed directions to a remote base camp, then explored for a while before finally looking down over a cliff to see what was clearly a film shoot going on down at the little beach below. Scrambling down we found Lance who is shooting the documentary footage for the films promotion. I confess to never having read 'Where the Wild Things Are', but todays shoot was apparently the very end of the story when our hero Max leaves the island where, I assume, the wild things turned out to be. The child actor was in a cute little story-book sailing boat, surrounded (out of shot) by a couple of big rubber dinghies, containing cameras, frogmen, life guards, etc. On the beach were half a dozen actors in huge monster costumes which were absolutely wonderful. By this time it was extremely hot so the people inside were just dying with the heat, but they soldiered on. It was really interesting to watch them all working and will be funny to see that moment in the final film. Compared to a live show, movie-making is such a slow and precise process - they probably got about ten seconds of footage this afternoon.

We stayed for a couple of hours before hiking back up the cliff trail to leave. About half way up the cliff we heard a voice barking through a loud hailer way below, 'get out of the shot!, GET OUT OF THE SHOT!' We didnt think much of it for a moment, then realized, to our great embarrassment, that they were yelling at us, so we duly fled. Consequently, when the movie comes to your local cineplex, do keep an eye out for two roadies diving for cover in the background of the final scene.

Spent the evening with friends at Rosati, an Italian place on Flinders Lane, then strolled by a couple of bars, ending up with sangria at the Canary Club. Im going to miss Melbourne.

Within the bands entourage (certainly by comparison to the crews clockwork scheduling) travel departure times are often a little loose. This morning was especially so, due to three contradictory memos which had been emailed out last night and this morning.

There was a 6.30pm conference call arranged between Bono (Dublin), The Edge (Los Angeles), Steve Matthews (London) and myself (also London) to blow the cobwebs off our brains and discuss the reincarnation of the Vertigo Tour.

I was planning on resurrecting the tour diary today, being the day we were scheduled to fly to Auckland for the load-in tomorrow. However, its now old news that the remainder of the tour dates have been postponed, so Im not going anywhere further than the corner cafe. Its been a very weird week indeed - much akin to driving into a wall.